WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has been holed up in the Embassy of Ecuador in London since June 19, 2012. As we reported earlier, on the morning of August 16, 2012, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño announced that his country would grant diplomatic asylum to the creator of WikiLeaks. Ecuador has based its decision on 11 considerations.

Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said that the United Kingdom will not grant a safe passage for Assange to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy, and stressed that the UK's legal obligation “is to extradite him to Sweden”, as reported by the BBC [es].

Assange is wanted by the Swedish authorities for two alleged sex crimes in 2010. In December of the same year, Assange was arrested by the British police on a warrant issued by Sweden. On December 16, 2010 he was granted a conditional bail that would keep him from leaving the country.

Assange was facing imminent extradition to Sweden for interrogation about sexual allegations he has not been charged for, where he would have been detained upon arrival in solitary with no right to bail, according to Fair Trials International. At the last minute he decided to exercise his right of seeking asylum. He walked into the Embassy of Ecuador and has stayed under diplomatic protection while the country's President Rafael Correa reviewed his case.

The Ecuadorean government based its decision on past and current attacks on WikiLeaks, its founder and even volunteers, which have been unprecedented both in scale and severity.

Assange supporters outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on August 16, 2012. Photo by Yanice Idir, copyright Demotix.

Efren Guerrero of the Aura Neurotica [es] blog wrote about the case before the announcement of the decision to grant asylum to Assange. Efren explained Ecuador's two options if asylum was granted:

a. Indefinitely leave the exiled person at the embassy in London, or b. Transport him to Ecuadorian territory. In the second case there is need for a pass, which as indicated by the English authorities will not happen.
The International Court of Justice stated in several rulings that “the security that comes of asylum can not be interpreted as a protection against the regular application of laws and against the jurisdiction of legally constituted tribunals.”

Twitter reactions on the part of Ecuadorians have been mixed. For example, Mauricio Rodriguez (@maurisec) [es] opined:

The newspaper El Comercio [es] reports that Assange's mother, Christine Assange, thanked Ecuador for granting asylum, “but is concerned about the fate of her son.”

Ecuador has called for urgent meetings [es] with the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the Organization of American States (OAS) to discuss Assange's case.

4 comments

As a journalist living in Ecuador I can say that Ecuador enjoys total press freedom. The fact that President Correa calls the local media “corrupt” or “mercantilist” is closer to his style to calling things by their name. This, in turn, has been used by the media to create fear that Correa might, at some point, beging excercising censorship. So far there is not a single reported case of any type of media closed by the government, nor political prosecution against any single journalist. The infamous trial against El Universo’s Emilio Palacio was by far a strictly legal personal judicial claim by Correa, who felt aggraviated by a harsh opinion article wrote by Palacio.
I don’t see any inconsistency in Correa granting asylum to Assange. On the contrary, it was the only logical action that Correa could take, considering his pro-people position in many different areas.